TransPennine is crowded and a victim of its own success. It has the highest seat occupancy rate of any train company – sounds great as the assets are sweated. The problem is that this translates into a daily crush for many – this photo shows the common situation. It’s capacity, capacity and capacity as passenger numbers continue to rise.

4 comments

How many empty seats with reservation tickets in that picture? I use occasionally for PRE-MAN as main connection, and only when they are working as ‘better than a Pacer’ on Manchester commuter services have I seen these trains seriously full. I suspect that Leeds also experiences this though. Not a patch on GN Moorgate’s for rammed full – sometimes you cannot actually get on the train at all.

The service offered by First TransPennine is truly shocking. I have used their trains to travel to Manchester twice in the past few weeks from Preston and from Carnforth and deeply regretted doing so on both occaisions. The level of overcrowding has to be seen and experienced to be believed. I travel widely in Europe for my work and I have not seen anything like this in London or other major cities, even at peak travel times. I have never ever before had to plead to be let onto a train or witnessed so many people being left behind by services that were full to the point where every available space is occupied.
From the comments on the First TransPennine Facebook pages and elsewhere on the internet it seems that the company has been in some sort of state of denial about this problem for a long time and it seems to think that bleating weakly about the arrival of new trains (I think that they only actually have 1 of these much heralded units in service) is the way of coping with the problem. The senior management should hang their heads in shame and really think very, very hard about what kind of ‘groupthink’ has allowed them to 1) get into this situation and 2) be so utterly incapable of implementing a plan to ease the problems that their customers are facing NOW. That’s NOW – not ‘some time in the future when new trains arrive’. Disgraceful, utterly disgraceful.

Dave H – rest assured these TPE services are seriously full. How do I know? Because I happen to work on the railway in Manchester for Northern Rail. As it happens , TPE are just in the process of introducing some extra rolling stock on the back of an electrification project between Manchester and the West Coast Mainline just south of Wigan. This should relieve some pressure in the next few months.